Staying Positive

Hiiiii my dear readers,

So one of the things about how happy you are in life is how you perceive situations. If you focus on the negative, then the situation will suck, and you'll feel like everything sucks, and then everything actually will suck.  If you focus on the positive, a.k.a. look on the bright side, then even if there are negatives, you won't feel as suck or even you'll feel better even if it did suck.  At least, I feel like perception functions this way for me.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I'm normally a cheerful person, but I will gossip and bash things and actions so quickly.  If I start even looking at one negative thing, then the rest of the conversation goes to shit, and it becomes a "misery loves company" gab fest.

This is what I mean.

I was planning a lesson with a teacher, and the thing is, our students have finished the textbook, and the last grammar point in the textbook was past tense, both regular and irregular.  We've been doing activities to practice the past tense for like three weeks now.  So I asked my teacher if maybe we could change it up a bit and review some other topic or just not make past tense the focus of the entire class time.  She agreed that past tense was getting old (ha ha).  Then I asked her what we should do, and she seemed to be at a loss and kept passing the idea ball back to me.

I suggested that maybe one activity we could do is listen to a piece of a popular American song and have students fill in the blanks for words they should know in the song.

Ah, that's too difficult for them. (In Japanese)

My teacher training kicked in.  Then I suggested how to scaffold the activity- how we could modify the activity to still address the same listening objective but put the task to the ability level of the students, "Okay, how about instead of blanks, I'll give them two or three words to choose from and they have to circle the word they hear?"

Hmmm, but that sounds not fun.

I have returned to the land of the free~

Welcome Back to Amurika

Today was the first day I drove a car after nine months of being in Japan.  Yesterday was my first visit to Walmart since nine months ago.  Since about two weeks ago I had bbqs, days at the mall, movie theater experience, and many other “all-american” things for the first time in a long time.  Although I have been experiencing a bit of reverse culture shock mostly in the forms of “Oh my goodness, they don’t make xyz-food or drink in these sizes!  This small xyz-food or drink is the same as a large in Japan!” and “Service in America will never compare to Japan’s.  Geez, so rude…,” I’m actually really glad to be back.  It’s nice to finally have been able to spend time with close friends and family I haven’t seen in so long and be able to hug and kiss people and not feel awkward about it in public.  However, I do really miss the mountains in the horizon, my Japanese friends, the ease and convenience of travel and consumerism, and all the memories I made there.  It’s really bittersweet actually.  Both countries have good and bad to them, and I can understand and appreciate both.  BUT, seriously, there is no place like home.  I’m so happy to be back.